RE: POSITION OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR
RE: Leading retreats in 2016
Selection criteria:
They know the Academy ethos
Sensitive to adult student needs
Reputable for and experienced in spiritual guidance
Can articulate spiritual needs and yearnings
Available for interview
Accept a negotiated remuneration.
Job Description for the retreat giver:
Be available on the date we set
Be willing to read the journals for that term however many that may be.
And return them within 2-3 weeks.
Lead the trainees in spiritual formation
Highlight one’s spiritual gifts
Explore the inner self
Re-ignite faith
Open up scriptures
Deal with hurt by finding spiritual remedies
Connect to the ministry
Support first timers.
The training assists...but ultimately it is the depth of our own spirituality within us and the gifts with which we've been blessed...that we bring before people, or sometimes miraculously, they draw from us.
The Application form will be forwarded by email.
MULTIFAITH ACADEMY FOR CHAPLAINCY AND COMMUNITY MINISTRIES INC.
Offering Qualifications in Spiritual Care
47 Dornoch Terrace, West End, Qld 4101.
PO Box 775 Stones Corner QLD. 4120
Telephone: 07 3255 2112
ABN: 35 020 644 975
June 2015
Dear
We approach you as someone who may be interested and willing to lead a retreat for our students. For us, a retreat begins the term so one is held on a Saturday in early March, mid-July or late August.. This role involves leading four or five mediations between 9.00 and 4.40 on a Saturday at our Oxley training venue, Canossa Care, The Lay Spirituality Centre, 169 Seventeen Mile Rocks Rd., Oxley. Parking is available within the grounds.
In your consideration, would you peruse the criteria appearing below and make an application should you be interested. A suitable but not generous remuneration will be available depending on our negotiations. The remuneration for this position has been negotiated as an honorarium only since the Academy is run by volunteers. More information appears on our website www.chaplaincyacademy.com
Selection criteria:
· Shares the Academy’s multifaith ethos
· Sensitive to adult student needs
· Reputable for and experienced in spiritual guidance
· Can articulate spiritual needs and yearnings
· Reasonable remuneration within a nfp organisation
· Making yourself available for an interview
· Optional: an authorised representative of a Faith Community.
Job Description for the retreat giver:
· Be available on the dates we set
· Be willing to read the journals for that term however many that may be.
· And return them within 2-3 weeks.
· Lead the trainees in spiritual formation
· Highlight one’s spiritual gifts
· Explore the inner self
· Re-ignite faith
· Open up scriptures
· Deal with hurt by finding spiritual remedies
· Connect to the ministry
· Support first timers.
This role is indeed a central one in the Academy’s Spiritual Formation Program. The retreat and the term-long journal writing is distinctive and unique to the Academy’s way of transforming the trainees into articulate and self-aware spiritual caregivers. Your task will be to feed the inner soul, so the students are sensitive to movements of the Spirit within their own lives so they can resonate to it in the people they seek to help. As you can see in the criteria, understanding how one deals effectively with past hurts, griefs and traumas is very much part of this role.
Of course, your application and enquiries will be treated as confidential and should be directed to the Executive (Confidential) at the address above. We look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Greg Smith
Academic Dean, For the Executive
ATTACHMENT to the Role Description of MACCM Spiritual Director
TALKING POINTS ON THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION by Ross Pitt
What purpose is theological reflection supposed to fulfill within pastoral care?
The answer to this question lies in the dual nature of Christian faith itself. Faith asks not just for assent to the Creedal truths, it asks that Christians also live their lives according to what they believe and try to shape the culture in which they live to reflect the moral and ethical norms of the Kingdom of God.[1] The colloquial way of saying this is: “Walk the Talk”. The requirement that faith be practiced arises from God’s call to every human being to serve Him every day and all day in every fibre of their being (body, mind, and spirit) and to love their neighbors as they love themselves.[2] In order to be faithful to this calling (vocation), Christians therefore need to see their normal everyday activities and all their relationships not as problems to be dealt with but as opportunities to serve God. They therefore need to develop a supernatural outlook[3] or mentality[4] towards these everyday things because, with the right intention, they can become sacred offerings to God. It is these normal daily activities that provide them with the opportunity to become fruitful branches grafted into Christ (the vine[5]), if they proceed virtuously[6] in accordance with their beliefs and if they respond selflessly to what they understand to be God’s will for them individually and communally.[7] Grasping this idea, making this connection, developing this supernatural outlook, and acting upon it, has been described as “making faith-sense”.[8]
The actual process of “making faith-sense” is a type of thinking called “theological reflection” in order to distinguish it from other thought processes. This manner of thinking is discussed in detail in the next question.
Chaplains engage in theological reflection for two main reasons[9]: first, because, as Christians they need to “make faith-sense” for themselves; but, second, they are also in the business of supporting others in their efforts at “making faith-sense”[10]. For Chaplains, theological reflection is an aid for discovering the signs of God’s presence[11] in (or the potential for God to be present in) the everyday realities of their own lives, in the dynamics of their pastoral encounters with others, and in the lives of those they meet in these pastoral encounters. But, in the process of making such discoveries, Chaplains come to realise that these signs of God’s presence are, in reality, human responses to God’s invitation to mankind to live out a personal and communal relationship of divine filiation[12] with Him as Trinity[13]. For all Christians, the essence of their divine filiation with God is to live out their earthly existence giving the will of God absolute priority in everything they do and to love their fellow men and women as they love themselves. Discerning the significance of their divine filiation and comprehending what love of neighbor means in practice, is mediated to Christians through receiving the Sacraments, through liturgy, through Scripture and its exegesis, through Church doctrine, and through personal spiritual formation and spiritual direction or spiritual companioning.
To offer pastoral care to others (irrespective of whether these recipients are practising Christians or not) is one practical way to live out the relationship of divine filiation with God as Trinity. When Chaplains make an offer to form a pastoral relationship with someone, the Holy Spirit, working through them, can make God as Trinity more fruitfully present for the recipient[14] and God can be “made-sense” of by the recipient. In this respect, pastoral care is apostolic.[15] Chaplains also have an obligation to use their pastoral encounters to attend to issues of morality and ethics and not set them aside in order to communicate acceptance and forgiveness.[16] So, when supporting others in their efforts at “making faith sense”, the vocation of pastoral care has both moral and apostolic dimensions which need to be explicit within the pastoral functions of healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, and nurturing spiritual growth.[17] It is not sufficient for a Chaplain to be a well-intentioned, empathic, virtuous person competent at using non-directive techniques because each one these pastoral functions can really only be explained in theological terms.[18]
In summary, the main purpose of theological reflection within pastoral care is to provide the means for Chaplains to “make faith-sense” of their own Christian vocation but also to support others in their efforts at “making faith-sense” via the pastoral functions of healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, and nurturing spiritual growth.
Note: This particular conceptualization of the purpose of theological reflection is but one of three broad trajectories that are discernible within the field of Pastoral/Practical Theology. Pattison & Lynch[19] would categorise the above conceptualisation as one of the “Neo-traditional confessional approaches” for several reasons: the focus on the work and experiences of those who practise some form of pastoral ministry, the emphasis on personal spirituality, and the primacy given to the concept of revealed truth within the Christian tradition as the basis for guiding theology and practice. The other trajectories are: “Liberal-rational approaches” (which sees theological reflection as doing publicly defensible theology by “normative analysis and critique of the action-guiding worldviews, assumptions, and behaviours prevalent in contemporary culture and experience that does not draw simply on the concepts, values, and beliefs of the Christian church”. [20]) and “Radical-liberationist approaches” (which emphasizes the structures and dynamics of power in particular contexts).
How is theological reflection supposed to operate within pastoral care?
Within the scholarly literature on theological reflection one can discern a line of logic comprising at least six foundational propositions, which, when read as a whole, go towards answering this question. Cast in a form that has specific reference to the pastoral care provided by Chaplains, the first proposition is that theological reflection focuses on the here and now of the pastoral encounter.[21] The second proposition is that human reflection, using the paradigms of the human sciences (e.g., needs, developmental stages, adjustment to losses and grief, etc.) is the normal and natural means by which Chaplains understand the dynamics of their pastoral encounters with others and by which they interpret what has been happening to the other person and what issues are confronting them. The third proposition is that such human reflection calls upon a range of resources (namely, the accumulated knowledge they have acquired as part of their on-going formation as a person in their immediate family and in their broader social networks) and methods [namely, both logic (inductive and deductive thinking) and intuition (trusting their emotions)]. The fourth proposition is that Chaplains cannot live their Christian faith commitment without engaging in such human reflection because, notwithstanding the predilections that arise from nature and nurture, they still retain substantial freedom (autonomy) to choose how they live their lives and relate to others. The fifth proposition is that the Chaplain’s own spiritual/religious tradition is a useful resource at their disposal when trying to make faith-sense of what has been happening to others and what spiritual and moral/ethical issues are confronting them[22]. The sixth proposition is that when they call upon the resource of their own spiritual/religious tradition in their pastoral encounters (and when later mulling over these pastoral encounters) they are doing something that makes this aspect of human reflection so generically different from other modes of human reflection as to warrant labeling it “theological”. The difference can be attributed to several factors: the type of understanding they employ, the subject matter they focus on, the priority they give to their spiritual/religious tradition as a resource relative to the other resources at their disposal, and the intention with which they do the reflecting.
Theological reflection is reflection “for” a purpose and not just reflection “about” the nature of something. It is thus action-oriented. Within pastoral care, theological reflection operates by correlating experience[23] with the spiritual/religious tradition for the sake of praxis.[24] When Chaplains attempt to correlate their own experience (or that of another) with their spiritual/religious tradition[25] they employ the same hermeneutical process that normally attends thoughts and desires that move humans emotionally and that prompt them to wonder whether these are responses to some reality that bestows meaning on life. They move through several cognitive stages: first, registering things as unaligned and unregulated; second, seeing them as connected, though not yet intelligibly so; and then, discerning the connection consciously. [26]
What all the methods[27] or styles of theological reflection have in common is a threefold movement[28] that proceeds, first, by articulating the lived experience of the lay chaplain or of the other person(s) in the pastoral encounter; second, by correlating this experience with the sources of the Christian spiritual/religious tradition; and third, by drawing out the practical implications for Christian living.
MACCM Role Description of retreat giver. GS. 8-9-14. V. 1.
[1] This formulation is an attempt to synthesise all three of George Lindbeck’s (1984) typologies for doing theology: propositionalist (theology seeks to articulate truth claims for assent); experimental-expressivist (theology like art or poetry seeks to express what human beings universally experience); and cultural-linguistic (theology attempts to objectify a particular religious culture and its embodiment in narrative and ritual because religions are comprehensive interpretative schemes, embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world).
[2] Dt 6:5; Mt 22:37-40; John 15:12-17
[3] Fernandez (1988, Vol. 1 p. 133)
[4] McGhee (2007, p. 73)
[5] John 15:4-7
[6] Pembroke (2007, Ch. 10) employs the virtue ethics paradigm to do three things: to explain that virtues are moral habits, to outline the relationship between the human and theological virtues, and to promote the importance of the virtues of integrity, courage, and compassion for addressing the moral challenges that arise in living as a Christian.
[7] In this formulation I am trying to include the four sources of morality: virtue (Aristotle); will (Duns Scotus); duty (Kant); and consequences (Torah)
[8] This term was coined by Kinast (1999, p. ix) to refer to the interpretative guidance practice of the early Church called mystical or wisdom theology. “Making faith-sense” is very useful terminology because it allows one to subsume the “functionalism” proposed by Clebsch & Jaekle (1964) and the “perspectivalism” proposed by Hiltner (1958) that are seen to be in conflict. It also allows one to subsume another conflict, viz., whether pastoral care necessarily entails the explicit proclamation of the Christian gospel [as advocated by Thurneysen (1962)] versus communication of Christian meanings through accepting, caring relationships [Carl Rogers uses the phrase “unconditional positive regard” to describe the required stance of the pastoral carer in such relationships] that seek to embody those meanings (Wise 1966, p. 8). This terminology is flexible enough to embrace the views of Oates (1962) who saw the defining marks of pastoral care as theological and Oden (1966), who, in attempting to correlate Barth theology and Carl Roger’s therapeutic approach, concluded that the Christian kerygma can only be made explicit and thus clearly known through revelation as understood by Barth.